Harry "The Hump" Riccobene, 89, a well-known South Philadelphia mob figure who survived a series of attempted gangland hits during a bloody street war with rival Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, died June 19 at the Dallas State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, where he was serving a life sentence for a 1982 murder.
The cause of death was not reported.
Mr. Riccobene, who stood barely five feet tall, became known as "The Hump" because of a childhood deformity in his spine.
He was described as "charming and charismatic" by several law enforcement figures who investigated, arrested and prosecuted him over the years.
His career spanned nearly three generations of the underworld and included convictions for racketeering, gambling and drug dealing, as well as the murder of Scarfo associate Frank Monte.
Mr. Riccobene spent nearly half his life behind bars, "but it was hard not to like him," said Fred Martens, the former executive director of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. "There was a charisma about him. It was hard to put the word killer and Harry together, even when you knew who he was."
Martens said that Mr. Riccobene worked for five mob bosses over the years in South Philadelphia before clashing violently with Scarfo in the early 1980s.
"He had no respect for Scarfo," Martens said. "And he couldn't hide it. . . . With Harry, what you saw was what you got. That's just the way he was."
Mr. Riccobene lost two family members--a half-brother, Robert, and a nephew, Enrico--to mob violence during the war with Scarfo.
Another half-brother, Mario, became a government witness and was killed in 1993 after leaving the federal Witness Security Program and returning to South Philadelphia.
Mr. Riccobene was targeted several times during the Scarfo war, but he survived. His response after one attempt was quintessential Riccobene, say investigators familiar with the story.
Mr. Riccobene, then in his seventies, was in a phone booth talking to his girlfriend, who was in her twenties, when a young Scarfo gunman ambushed him. He was shot three or four times before he managed to wrestle the gun away from the much younger and bigger hit man.
By the time police arrived, the gunmen had fled.
Mr. Riccobene, bleeding and holding the empty handgun, was asked how he got the weapon.
"The other guy was done with it," he said.
Celeste Morello, a South Philadelphia criminologist and historian and the author of "Before Bruno," a book about the early days of the Philadelphia mob, said she had dozens of conversations with Mr. Riccobene over the years while conducting her research.
Mr. Riccobene started out in the underworld as a 17-year-old, she said, and worked with most of the major mob figures in Philadelphia and in New York, where he was recruited as a soldier in the infamous Castellammarese War, an internecine struggle that established the structure of the Mafia in the United States.
"He was personable, very affable," Morello said. "And he knew everybody in the underworld--Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, everybody."
Mr. Riccobene's survivors include six sisters.
